FeedBurner Announces New Interactive RSS Service

FeedBurner, the leading feed management provider, today launched a new service, FeedFlare, which enhances the way subscribers, publishers and Web services interact with RSS feeds. Subscribers to FeedFlare-enabled feeds will see an integrated suite of Web services meta-data and actions related to the content items, such as a live display of the most popular tags for the item, an ability to email or save the item to a social bookmarking service, and more.

FeedFlare will be available immediately to the more than 100,000 publishers currently using FeedBurner subscription services including some of the most popular bloggers and podcasters as well as commercial publishers. Separately today, FeedBurner announced that Reuters, the world’s largest international multimedia news source, has become its latest commercial publisher customer.

Any FeedBurner publisher who activates the FeedFlare service gains the flexibility to include associated actions with a content item wherever it is displayed: in an RSS aggregator, on the originating Web page, or in an email, creating a common thread that ties all the different consumption experiences together in a consistent way. This live thread gives publishers a virtual Content Management System, an independent means of adding instant community and actions to a feed, Web site or blog.

From my understanding, FeedBurner’s new “FeedFlare” will bring the “live web page” to your feeds through FeedBurner. Currently, when viewing a feed, you have an option to read the summary or full article as set by the website’s feed controls, and if you want to actually view the whole article, you click on the title and it opens in your browser so you can see all the pretty layout and graphics.

With FeedFlare, you will be able to view comments, tag the post with del.icio.us, email the link to others, and view a list of links that link to this article to find out what others are saying about it. I’m sure that advertising and other money making and interactive elements will be added to the feed.

Is this a good thing or bad? Do you want more information and the ability to gather more information about posts in your feeds? What would you like to see in your feeds? What information is important to you? And if you have a feed on your blog or site, how do you feel about some of these controls being provided to your feeds without permission when viewed through FeedBurner? What do you think?

2 Comments

Well I do like some of the FeedFlares like the ability to bookmark directly to delicious, and the email to friend link. I also believe it allows you to show what tags are used in each post too.

On a totally different topic, what do you think of the format OPML? Do you think it will stay just for blogrolls and RSS feedrolls? I just want to see what you think of OPML. BTW I have been using OPML on my WP.com blog.

I don’t play with OPML or blogrolls, if you notice. I hand out links within articles left, right, and sideways, so a blogroll doesn’t do much for me except as a resource list. So I await more info and articles on OPML from you to see what the thrill is all about!